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Corporate governance and dividend pay-out policy in UK listed SMEs: The effects of corporate board characteristics AbstractPurpose: This paper examines the extent to which corporate board characteristics influence the level of dividend pay-out ratio using a sample of UK small and medium-sized enterprises

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Past evidence generally suggests that the presence of female directors on corporate boards tends to improve earnings quality due to these directors’ superior monitoring abilities. However, it is not clear which characteristics and skills of female directors drive such abilities. In this paper, we focus on the financial background of female directors, an area which remains largely unexplored in existing literature. The results show that the participation of female directors with relevant financial background improves earnings quality more than the participation of female directors without such background. In addition, our findings suggest that only female directors possessing relevant financial background and having fewer outside directorships are able to mitigate earnings management and therefore overcommitting expert female directors with more outside directorships would diminish their monitoring ability. We did not find any evidence suggesting that female directors without relevant financial background are able to mitigate earnings management, irrespective of their outside directorships or tenure. We interpret our findings within a theoretical framework that draws on a number of economic and social theories. The results are generally robust after controlling for potential endogeneity problems.

Purpose: We investigate the association among trustee board diversity (TBD), corporate governance (CG), capital structure (CS) and financial performance (FP) using a sample of UK charities. Specifically, we investigate the effect of TBD on CS, and ascertain whether CG quality moderates the TBD-CS nexus.Additionally, we examine the impact of CS on FP, and ascertain whether the CS-FP nexus is also moderated by TBD and CG quality.Design/methodology/approach: We employ a number of multivariate regression techniques, including ordinary least squares, fixed-effects, lagged-effects and two-stage least squares to rigorously analyse the data and test the hypotheses.Findings: First, we find that trustee board gender diversity has a negative effect on CS, but this relationship holds only up to the point of having three women trustees. We find similar, but relatively weak results for the presence of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic trustees. Second, we find that the TBD-CS nexus depends on the quality of CG with the relationship being stronger in charities with higher frequency of meetings, independent CG committee, and larger trustee and audit firm size. Third, we find that CS structure has a positive effect on FP, but this is moderated by TBD and CG quality. Our evidence is robust to different econometric models that adjust for alternative measures and endogeneities. We interpret our findings within the explanations of a theoretical perspective that captures insights from different CG and CS theories. Originality/value: Existing studies on TBD, CG, CS and FP in charities are rare. Our study distinctively attempts to address this empirical lacuna within the extant literature by providing four new insights with specific focus on UK charities. First, we provide new evidence on the relationship between TBD and CS.Second, we offer new evidence on the moderating effect of CG on the TBD-CS nexus. Third, we provide new evidence on the effect of CS on FP. Finally, we offer new evidence on the moderating effect of TBD and CG on the CS-FP nexus.

A considerable amount of accounting, economics and finance studies have investigated the link between corporate governance (CG) and performance in profit and non‐profit organisations. This paper departs from the existing literature by investigating the relationship between CG structures and both financial performance (FP, measured as return on assets (ROA) and equity (ROE)) and non‐financial performance, measured as league points won (NFP‐Points), of sports organisations with specific focus on UK premier leagues' football (soccer) teams. We collect data relating to CG structures, FP and NFP‐Points of football clubs playing in the four UK premier leagues in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales along with the English Championship teams over the 2011–2016 period. We analyse our data relating to 80 football clubs over a 6‐year period (generating 397 club‐year observations) by running a number of multivariate analyses to test our hypotheses. Our findings are as follows. First, we find that NFP‐Points is higher in clubs with larger boards, non‐executive directors (NED), CEO role duality, and higher percentage of foreign and/or younger directors, but lower in firms with higher percentage of female directors. Second and by contrast, we find that the relationship between these same set of variables and FP is, however, insignificant except for boards with NED that remained significant and negatively related to ROA. Our findings appear to reflect the prioritisation of on‐the‐field performance over off‐the‐field performance by sports organisations. Our evidence is largely robust to using alternative measures and estimation models.